Opportunistic content delivery using delta coding

Abstract

Systems and methods are described for avoiding redundant data transfers using delta coding techniques when reliably and opportunistically communicating data to multiple user systems. According to embodiments, user systems track received block sequences for locally stored content blocks. An intermediate server intercepts content requests between user systems and target hosts, and deterministically chucks and fingerprints content data received in response to those requests. A fingerprint of a received content block is communicated to the requesting user system, and the user system determines based on the fingerprint whether the corresponding content block matches a content block that is already locally stored. If so, the user system returns a set of fingerprints representing a sequence of next content blocks that were previously stored after the matching content block. The intermediate server can then send only those content data blocks that are not already locally stored at the user system according to the returned set of fingerprints.

Description

FIELD[0001]Embodiments relate generally to communications systems, and, more particularly, to opportunistic content delivery using delta coding techniques.BACKGROUND[0002]In many cases, it is desirable to deliver streams or files to the requestor while opportunistically multicasting the same information to others on the network who could potentially be interested in this content at a future point in time. Traditional approaches to prepositioning data streams and files via multicast to remote devices typically involve either: a master copy being maintained on an intermediate server so that when the data is later requested from the remote device, missing data elements or forward error correction codes can later be transmitted to fill in the holes; or remote devices requesting missing data as the multicast is being received.[0003]Additionally, traditional approaches to delta coding and the like rely on keeping track of the information stored on both the client and server sides of a net...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0004]Among other things, systems and methods are described for opportunistically avoiding redundant data transfers to users by using a stateless intermediate server and delta coding techniques. When a user requests content over a communications network, the user can already have a locally stored copy of some or all of the requested content (e.g., because of a previous request for the content, anticipatorily pre-positioned content, etc.). According to embodiments, the user systems track received block sequences for locally stored content blocks. An intermediate server, disposed in the communications network between the requesting user system and the target host system, deterministically chucks the content data as it is intercepted from the host in response to user requests, and generates fingerprints (e.g., checksums) of the content chunks. Fingerprints of

Problems solved by technology

Typically, this further involves overhead for keeping the delta coders (e.g., dictionaries and the like) synchronized.

When delta coding is applied to multicast stream distribution, the network overhead for maintaining coder synchronization can be lar

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